Do Republicans Not Know Trump Is A Congenital Liar? Or Do They Just Not Care? Or Even Approve?

If you input "Big Lie" into Google, the first thing that pops up is Post Malone's song.

Say you flexin' that's a big lie, when I pull up give that bitch my line
And you know that I'ma get mine, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, when I pull up give that bitch my line
And you know that I'ma get mine, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you got the shit you don't got
Heard you say that shit a hundred times, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you flexin' that's a big lie
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you flexin' that's a big lie

Right after that you get the wikipedia definition-- including the original German große Lüge-- explaining that the Big Lie is a propaganda technique that was coined by Hitler in 1925 for his book, Mein Kampf, the only book that Trump is known to have read and which is first wife says he keeps on his night stand. Hitlerexplained that the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." Sound familiar?

Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, a forerunner of Huckabee's daughter, "put forth a slightly different theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the expression 'big lie'. Goebbels wrote the following paragraph in an article dated 12 January 1941, 16 years after Hitler's first use of the phrase. The article, titled Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik (English: "From Churchill's Lie Factory") was published in Die Zeit ohne Beispiel.

The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

During World War II the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, a precursor to the CIA) prepared a report on Hitler's psychological profile, that included this-- "His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it." Who does that sound like?

Last year, Emily Dreyfuss, writing for Wired, explained how the Big Lie technique is used by people like Trump: repetition.

You only use 10 percent of your brain. Eating carrots improves your eyesight. Vitamin C cures the common cold. Crime in the United States is at an all-time high.

None of those things are true.

But the facts don't actually matter: People repeat them so often that you believe them. Welcome to the “illusory truth effect,” a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth. Marketers and politicians are masters of manipulating this particular cognitive bias-- which perhaps you have become more familiar with lately.

President Trump is a "great businessman," he says over and over again. Some evidence suggests that might not be true. Or look at just this week, when the president signed three executive orders designed to stop what he describes-- over and over again-- as high levels of violence against law enforcement in America. Sounds important, right? But such crimes are at their lowest rates in decades, as are most violent crimes in the US. Not exactly, as the president would have it, "American carnage."

...Repetition is what makes fake news work, too, as researchers at Central Washington University pointed out in a study way back in 2012 before the term was everywhere. It's also a staple of political propaganda. It's why flacks feed politicians and CEOs sound bites that they can say over and over again. Not to go all Godwin's Law on you, but even Adolf Hitler knew about the technique. "Slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea," he wrote in Mein Kampf.

The effect works because when people attempt to assess truth they rely on two things: whether the information jibes with their understanding, and whether it feels familiar. The first condition is logical: People compare new information with what they already know to be true and consider the credibility of both sources. But researchers have found that familiarity can trump rationality-- so much so that hearing over and over again that a certain fact is wrong can have a paradoxical effect. It's so familiar that it starts to feel right.

I'm going to guess this works even more effectively as you descend the intelligence curve and get to the average Trump voter.

This week presidential historian Jon Meacham castigated Trump for calling the media an "enemy of the people," pointing out that the phrase itself and that the whole reason authoritarians use it is part of a "totalitarian" strategy. "It’s an elective kind of base management. It’s pernicious, it’s dangerous... It’s simply a Stalinist phrase, for God’s sake. It comes out of totalitarian regimes to declare that a free press is the enemy of the people."

Early yesterday morning The Atlantic published an essay by Olivia Pascall, Trump's Tweets and the Creation of 'Illusory Truth', asserting that Trump's repetition of words like "witch hunt" could have a psychological effect on Americans-- say it enough, and people might start to believe it... Trump’s consistent tweeting-- and the constant media coverage of those tweets-- makes his favorite phrases familiar to the American public. And that familiarity could be key to making his claims seem plausible, even believable."

Every time a Trump tweet calling the investigation a “witch hunt” flashes up on people’s Twitter feeds or television screens-- regardless of the context-- it’s becoming more and more familiar to them. They’re becoming increasingly fluent in the language of Trump’s claimed innocence. Even if they don’t think Mueller’s investigation is a rigged witch hunt, they are becoming more and more familiar with the idea that it could be.

... [T]he way to combat this effect would be for people to stop responding directly to the president’s charges. “It’s actually very ineffective to say, ‘Oh, this isn’t a witch hunt,’ because what you’re doing is reinforcing the ‘witch hunt’ frame,” he says. “You can’t just get people to stop believing something by contradicting it.” [A more effective response is] creating a positive, alternative story, such as “Mueller’s investigation is aimed at safeguarding America’s elections.” But that’s not always a natural position for the president’s opponents, or the media, to take. What effect all of this repeated language could have on public opinion of the investigation itself is unclear. It probably won’t turn public opinion in the president’s favor anytime soon, but it might mean that people take the Russia investigation less seriously-- the most recent Suffolk poll is already indicating that it’s a relatively unimportant issue for voters in the midterms. It’s almost certainly succeeding in framing the debate around whether it’s a witch hunt. And maybe, for the president’s purposes, that’s enough.

Yesterday everyone was talking about Susan Glasser's New Yorker piece about Trump lying more... and purposefully. "In his first year as President," she wrote, "Trump made 2,140 false claims, according to The Post. In just the last six months, he has nearly doubled that total to 4,229. In June and July, he averaged sixteen false claims a day. On July 5th, The Post found what appears to be Trump’s most untruthful day yet: seventy-six per cent of the ninety-eight factual assertions he made in a campaign-style rally in Great Falls, Montana, were 'false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.'" The Post fact-checkers never refer to his lies as "lies," although their chief, Glenn Kessler pointed out that Señor T "has a habit of repeating the same falsehoods over and over again, especially as they concern his core political causes, such as trade or immigration or getting European allies to contribute more to NATO."

History books will likely declare the last few months a turning point in the Trump Presidency, and Kessler’s laborious work gives us metrics that confirm what is becoming more and more apparent: the recent wave of misstatements is both a reflection of Trump’s increasingly unbound Presidency and a signal attribute of it. The upsurge provides empirical evidence that Trump, in recent months, has felt more confident running his White House as he pleases, keeping his own counsel, and saying and doing what he wants when he wants to. The fact that Trump, while historically unpopular with the American public as a whole, has retained the loyalty of more than eighty per cent of Republicans-- the group at which his lies seem to be aimed-- means we are in for much more, as a midterm election approaches that may determine whether Trump is impeached by a newly Democratic Congress. At this point, the falsehoods are as much a part of his political identity as his floppy orange hair and the “Make America Great Again” slogan. The untruths, Kessler told me, are Trump’s political “secret sauce.”

...Other metrics make clear the significant changes in Trump’s approach to the Presidency in recent months, as he has become more confident, less willing to tolerate advisers who challenge him, and increasingly obsessed with the threats to his Presidency posed by the ongoing special-counsel investigation. One is the epic turnover rate of Trump’s White House staff, which as of June already stood at the unprecedented level of sixty-one per cent among the President’s top advisers.

...The previous gold standard in Presidential lying was, of course, Richard Nixon. Barry Goldwater, the Republican Presidential nominee four years before Nixon won the White House in 1968, famously called Nixon “the most dishonest individual I ever met in my life.” Writing in his memoirs, Goldwater observed that Nixon “lied to his wife, his family, his friends, longtime colleagues in the U.S. Congress, lifetime members of his own political party, the American people, and the world.”

There have been comparisons between Nixon and Trump since Trump first entered office, but these, too, have escalated in recent months as the President has been shadowed by the threat of the ongoing special-counsel investigation into the electronic break-in of the Democratic National Committee (another eerie Watergate echo) and whether Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia. Trump’s obsession with the special counsel, Robert Mueller, also comes with metrics: he has called the Mueller probe a “witch hunt” on Twitter more than twenty-one times a month on average this spring and summer, compared with an average of just three times a month in the previous nine months.

A little entertainment?